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André Alves

André Alves is interested in the de-politicization of the shared social scene and the weakening of an ethics of involvement within the competitive, reputational and accumulative economies of digital nativism and late capitalism.

The dissertation work currently titled "Beyond productivity: another kind of work", aims to discuss the contemporary
relationship of subjects with work and to rehearse collective possibilities beyond the negative imaginary formed
around it.
Beyond productivity is interested in discussing and opposing the identification of subjectivity with production at the
base of our shared capitalist reality, and the fiction of a seemingly self-sufficient and over-confident subject. I
investigate how this fiction generates a reality of individual insufficiency, separateness and un-sharing, while
exploring the possibility to outdo these fictions by real experiences of connecting.
My research is particularly attentive to, and critical of, the inclination to narrate the capitalistic subject as an inevitably
politically and affectively depressed imaginary. I take specific interest in the politics of staging feeling, learned from
the standpoint of methods in feminist approaches to social practice, deployed in order to collectively listen to personal
experience, realise affect and rethink contemporary relations between autonomy and heteronomy. My study argues
for a shift in emphasis from representation to resonance through the crafting of staged interventions of events that
explore the conversational exchange, relationships between image-text and narration as creative modes. Resonance
appears here as a key construct to investigate the critical and creative possibilities of attentive listening, and to find
ways to expand the productions that happen across bodies, subjectivities and intersectionalities within those
practices as a form of co-elaboration.
The methodological approach deployed in this study is informed by three main references: i) feminist standpoint
theory (concerning the micropolitics of listening to situated experience and situated feeling, as argued by Carol
Hanisch, Sandra Harding or Suzanne Lacy), ii) the approach of direct cinema (in particular, Jean Rouch and Edgar
Morin’s film “Chronicle of a summer” (1961), as a method that tests whether or not it was possible to act sincerely in
front of a camera, while discussing the topics of happiness in the working class), and iii) the ethical principle defined
by Marina Garcés in “Honesty with the real,” a criticism pointed at certain types of art that predetermines the value of
its propositions, rather than finding it through the education of newer perceptions, newer feelings and a newer
awareness, based on the actualisation of experience and meeting directly each reality.
Through my artistic practice, Beyond productivity explores the possibilities of dialogical encounter that take place in
multiple socially situated and context-reactive artistic interventions, such as art institutions, informal art spaces, nonartistic
spaces, and settings of labour, but also in the publication format as site for the encounter of co-elaborative
writing modes. The artistic projects included in Beyond productivity are:
- Sede da Juventude Cansada (public intervention; city of Porto; 2015)
- Suspended (exhibition and workshop; Centro de Arte Joven de Madrid; 2016)
- Body at rest (performative essay; CAA conference; 2016)
- Never ending dance (exhibition; Centro Cultural Vila Flor; 2017)
- O que falta é amor (participatory event; Guimarães; 2017) + co-elaborative text, with Filipa Araújo and Max
Fernandes
- Contact: a poetry of exportation of assimilating the other (exhibition; Centro El Carmen; 2018) + co-elaborative
text, with Diego del Pozo Bariuso
- Deflating the air-dancer (exhibition; Flatland; 2019)
- Estação Depressão (participatory event; Guimarães; 2019)
- Pre-text (exhibition and workshop; Momentum 10; 2019)
- Sede da Juventude Cansada – the play (play/event; city of Porto; 2020)
Beyond Productivity focuses on three main components that orient my practices as consecutive iterative movements.
The first concerns the politics of image-making and representation. It focuses on the figure of the Air-dancer as an
artistic model for capitalistic subjectivity and an entry point to examine the tendency to represent the contemporary
subject as an already politically-depressed imaginary. My study aims first to document but second, and perhaps more
crucially, to contest such tendencies, while situating the problems that an integrated world capitalism poses to
singularisation and agency.
The second component examines the possibilities of my artistic practice to rehearse collective-based emancipatory
interventions in response to such representations. That is, moving from a pathogenic to a salutogenic approach,
experimenting with the possibilities of these practices to reverberate the conditions of contemporary existence, and,
through forms of co-elaboration, craft other affective logics (in lieu of Diego del Pozo Barriuso’s terminology
‘dispositifs of artistic affectation’). This involves a reflection (aligned with Hal Foster’s “The Artist as Ethnographer”)
about the capacity of my practice to resist the projection of politic truths onto a constructed other, as well as
identifying the limitations of the capacity of my artistic practice to provide forms of engaged solidarity. The third
component of my study results from a close reflection about co-elaboration and resonance. I investigate how
resonance, rather than representation/participation, is a more appropriate way to understand and document the
affective translation that occurs across artworks and audiences. Resonance appears in my study, as a key construct
that reflects a shift from practices of representation and participation, to politics of encounter with the voice and oral
imagination. Resonance is proposed here (following Gemma Fiumara’s stance against a tradition that has endorsed
the power of discourse) as a different system of knowledge, an epistemological turn from saying to listening as a
creative mode, which supports the experience of creating a different spectator-listener.

André Alves research is currently supervised by Jessica Hemmings and Diego del Pozo Barriso, and received previous supervision by Andrea Phillips and Daniel Jewesbury.